HalfLife
by NillNull
Summary: Oneshot. Allen finally became the Fourteenth and murdered his friends, but he's still fighting his Noah side. Onesided RoadAllen. Tyki PoV. Minor, implied Allenx?. Also could be seen as slight TykiAllen if you're desperate. T for attempted suicide.


**So I wanted to write something for Allen and Road, and Tyki just suggested himself as narrator. This probably won't make much sense if you haven't read up till…pretty much the timeskip after the level 4. I forget what chapter that is.**

**This is set in a future where Allen turned into the Fourteenth and killed all his friends, but is still fighting it after being taken to live with the Noah. …I don't go into any detail, but the Earl presumably won, or is about to.**

**Warnings for suicide attempt, implied character death, and really, really lightly implied onesided Allenx? (you have to read and find out. I dun' wanna spoil it for ya). Seriously. It's pretty much not there at all. You probably wouldn't even have noticed it if I hadn't mentioned it.**

**DGM = not mine. Probably a good thing, going by this.**

**/edit/: oooh looky i got rid of some of the dumber stuff and tweaked a few sentences. WOOT.**

**……………………………………………………………………………………**

Tyki loves his little sister, who in the human world is his niece. He doesn't love his niece. She's a frail little thing with barely a spark of the Noah's shimmering electricity.

It's very hard to love someone who is two people at once. But for the Noah, it's the only option. Schizophrenia is part of their identity. Duality is what they do, what they breathe. The two halves of their souls fight and tear at each other, and it's what makes them what they are.

Tyki's little sister loves the most conflicted of them all. She loves all the faces that he never shows to them, that he never wears any more except when he thinks no-one's looking. The smiling face he shares with his friends when he's happy. The sorrowful face he wears for the akuma. His black grinning face for when he beats an unsuspecting card sharp at poker. The face of pain and anger he wears as he fights for something he loves. Even the face of raw grief when he thinks about his friends and what he did to them. She hates the dull and empty face he shows her when she tries to make him play with her. This makes Tyki hate it too.

Even with the Fourteenth's memories writhing inside him, staining his soul, Allen is spotless. His face, screwed up in pain, glows with purity. Unlike them, he knows exactly what he is. He's a white flame of certainty and devotion, and the poor broken Noah are drawn, fluttering, towards him. Tyki watches him try to reconcile his love for humanity with his hatred for the Earl and all his possessions. Even the akuma are easier to love.

And now he watches Road.

Her shining, sinful skin, the colour of ashes. Her soft, unruly midnight hair. Her thin, childish limbs and giddy laughter as she tortures another poor soul into madness. The string of crosses adorns her forehead like a crown. She's his princess.

He watches Allen.

His big silver eyes shining with grief and love. The red jagged slash down the side of his face. Against the soft white and pink of his skin, it's so beautiful it makes him want to cry.

He's been watching Allen all this time. As a Noah and as a human noble, he has his spies and his ways of finding things out.

This is how he knows that Allen saw the Fourteenth whenever he looked in a mirror, right up until the time he changed, and that he hated himself for it. Now that Allen has become the Fourteenth, he still hates himself, but at least the reflection fits.

This is how he knows that Allen used to wake up screaming from visions of an akuma Mana Walker attacking him while shrieking a curse.

This is how he knows that while he was turning into the Fourteenth, Allen would cry out in his pain and delirium, and that what he was crying out was the name of a fellow Exorcist. He also knows that the Exorcist never once replied, or even looked at him, once he found out about it.

This is how he knows that Allen now wakes up screaming from visions of ripping that boy to pieces with his bare hands.

This is how he knows that Allen cries himself back to sleep, still whispering that name.

Now that he's become the Fourteenth, Allen battles endlessly against his internal Noah. When it tries to wake up, he fights it until he's screaming in agony from being ripped apart inside, with blood running down his face from the crosses opening and closing over and over again on his forehead. What Allen is trying to do, although he doesn't see it like that, is keep his white side in control all the time, and shut his Noah side away. Tyki knows that this is foolish and hopeless, because the white side of a Noah is nothing more than a toy mask, to be worn on special occasions only.

Allen refuses to embrace the Noah inside him, which is why he is kept locked in a suite on the Ark, where only Road, Tyki and the Earl ever visit him. Sometimes Road comes back crying, and Tyki is the one who comforts her. He knows better than to try and reason with the boy. After they removed his Innocence, properly this time so that he still had an arm, he seemed to change, to become at times unstable and even somewhat cruel.

………………………………………………………………………………………

Allen tries to kill himself, and it's only by chance that Tyki finds him in time, lying crumpled in a corner with tears still wet on his cheeks and blood all over the floor. He'd come in to see whether the boy would be interested in another of their poker rematches. Tyki loses every time, but lives in hope. He admires Allen's conviction in overcoming God's law, the rules that he lives by, in order to escape his guilt and torment. It's surprising how much he's changed since his transformation.

After they've bandaged him up, handcuffed him to the bed and removed all the sharp objects from his rooms, Road throws her arms around Allen's neck, crying, and declares that she will never, ever leave his side and that if he tries to hurt himself again she will never, ever forgive him.

Two hours later Tyki finds her playing golf at the bottom of the garden, using Lero to hit eggs into the pond as the umbrella squawks in protest. He puts it down to her mercurial nature and Allen's blatant hostility. He sighs and asks himself again why he agreed to help her.

………………………………………………………………………………………

Tyki sits at Allen's bedside and watches him stare into the empty air, into the past, hands mindlessly clutching and unclutching at the bedclothes. He wants to ask if he's looking at the dead boy who wouldn't love him, the boy with hair like a nighttime waterfall. But he doesn't because it would only start an argument, and despite everything Tyki still likes Allen and hates arguing with him. Road gets upset when they fight, anyway.

Even worse, Allen might start crying again. He hates it when Allen cries. It's like watching an angel dying, and it tugs at whatever's left of his corrupt Noah's heart.

So instead Tyki asks if he wants another poker rematch. Allen looks at him, and for a minute he thinks he's blown it and the boy's going to cry anyway. Then he smiles his heartbreaking smile and says yes.

They play for matches on the sunlit bedspread, and after a while Road comes in to watch with her thin arms draped around Allen's shoulders. The three make a lovely picture, an evil, broken family, and Tyki thinks to himself that it wouldn't be so bad to spend the rest of his life on these endless games, the rematches he always loses.

Maybe one day he'll finally be able to win. Maybe one day they won't have to hate themselves any more.

If that could happen, he wouldn't mind waiting, even if it was forever.

**…………………………………………………………………………………………**

**I don't really have anything to say after that. Except that when I started this was much more cheerful. It was even going to be funny. Guess I screwed that up.**


End file.
